Adventures in marriage: Grocery shopping

photo by osbock
My husband and I grocery shopped together for years. We weren’t the happy, hand-holding-while-shopping couple. No. We were more likely to be the couple circling the parking lot forever to find a close spot and having the great debate in Aisle 4 over which cereal to buy. Sometimes he even went as far as to replace items I’d put in the cart with items he thought were better. I’d get home and swear I had bought Italian bread only to find a loaf of fat-free wheat bread. I refer to this as one of the “what is this?” post-shopping moments.

Every trip consisted of my husband wandering off, and I’d spend 20 minutes tracking him down. And he had the nerve to imply that it was I who had wandered off. Ha! I don’t know why we shopped together, but it might have had something to do with the fact that I despise grocery shopping, or any shopping, for that matter. I felt better knowing he was sharing my misery.

Once we had children, our shared shopping ended. It became my responsibility, and one I’d sometimes do anything to escape. I’ve even faked a sudden case of bad ham-itus to stay home. I’m fine once I’m there, and it’s no big deal. But I have a low threshold for some of my fellow shoppers. When they stop in the middle of an aisle for what seems like an eternity, I sometimes imagine popping them in the head with a kiwi. Move it already, people!

My sweet husband sometimes offers to do the shopping. He requests only that I create the shopping list. Sounds like a good plan, right? Wrong! First off, doesn’t he live here, too? Surely, after 10 years of marriage, he knows what we eat, right? I’m not sure what happens when you send your spouse to the grocery store, but I can share what happens when I do. Pickled bologna is what happens! Pickled bologna is how I refer to the first time he bought something that was not on the shopping list. He had never tried bologna in a jar before and never actually ate it after buying it. That unopened jar of stink meat sat in the refrigerator, staring at me, like some sort of science experiment for months before I finally couldn’t take it anymore and tossed it out.

I won’t get into what happens if I have coupons.

My poor husband. He has nothing but the best of intentions, and I am thankful that he sometimes does the shopping. I say this jokingly, but he can’t be trusted with the responsibility of food shopping. Maybe he does this on purpose? It’s his own version of bad ham-itus. The fact is, if the task were left entirely up to him, we’d be in the poorhouse on just his purchases of mega-jars of pickles. You don’t want to ever run out of dill pickles, right?

He’s a brilliant man, and I send him off so he can learn how to do something domestic other than make a good cup of coffee. If something ever happened to me, I wouldn’t want them all to starve. That, and because I want to be treated like the princess that I am.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

About Sara Noel

One Comment

I’ve been asked what bad ham-itus is.
Some people call in sick to work and claim they have food poisoning. They use excuses such as bad Chinese food or undercooked beef. It’s overused as an excuse so often that it’s not really believable. So instead of saying I have cramps I say must be bad ham. It’s a joke between my husband and I, so he knows when I really don’t want to do something. If there’s a social gathering coming up, I might say I feel a case of bad ham coming on. Same with if we’re already at a social gathering and I want to leave. I say I think I had some bad ham. Sometimes before having to do something neither of us want to, we’ll both in unison agree it’s a bad ham day.
Silly stuff.